The Midterm Exam is THIS Week

The on-line ETUDES midterm exam is available from Wednesday February 21 at 1:30 PM through Sunday February 25, 2007 at 10:00 PM. If you have a problem with this time-frame you should have already contacted me for alternatives.

I've created a separate document which explains and describes the midterm exam and offers several pointers to resources which may help you when you take the exam.

The Materials this Week

This is midterm week so your only responsibility is to complete the midterm exam. There is no homework being assigned this week.

However, there are some lecture documents, resources, and some reading which you should read after you have completed the midterm exam - and they are:

• Image Basics

  Image Optimization - Nothing communicates the topic of a web page more immediately than a well chosen image. However images add significantly to the file size 'weight' of your web site so it's important to take steps to produce the best quality image at the smallest file size. The process of Image Optimization helps to ensure that your image-enhanced web pages can download at a reasonable speed.
   
  Background Images - Well-chosen background images can help a web site communicate mood and meaning, and can be positioned and layered in combination with other elements to produce interesting graphic effects and illusions. We will do a bit of exploration into a few of the things that background images can do.

• Manipulating Visibility

  Overflow - As you have seen in our discussion of the box model, an element that is too large for its containing block can overflow past the content area of the containing block. If this is undesirable, the designer can use the CSS overflow property to confine the visibility of the overflowing content, and to control how overflowing content is viewed within the confined area.
   
  Clipping - The CSS clip property can be used in conjunction with the overflow property to further control the width and height of the viewed content within the confinement area of the overflowed element. This is analogous to padding, allowing the designer to add visual space between the edges of the confinement area of overflowed element and the viewable content. (I'll make this more clear in the lecture with illustrations)
   
  Visibility - You can use the visibility property to control the visibility of an entire element. Its primary purpose is to enable user-interaction on the web page. For example, the visibility property can be used to simulate image maps, with the addition of rollover effects. The visibility property is used in conjunction with layers, JavaScript, and dynamic pseudo-classes to create popup menus or other user-interaction components on the web page.

Good luck, and let me know if you are experiencing problems.